When your number is up, it’s up.

A passing jogger was fatally crushed in a Central Florida neighborhood Tuesday when a 40-foot magnolia tree fell on her, according to Local 6 News.

Titusville police said Amber Ferrall, 27, (pictured, right) was reported missing after she did not come home from her daily morning jog Tuesday.

City of Titsuville workers who were called to remove a large fallen tree on Rainey Road and County Club Drive found Ferrall’s body underneath the tree trunk.

Police said Farrell was pinned under the tree’s 2-foot wide trunk when it fell on her as she was jogging about 25 feet away on the side of a residential street.

The rotten roots of the tree apparently gave way and it landed on top of her in the middle of the road at 3740 Raney Road, police said.

“It’s a really freak, tragic accident,” Titusville Police spokesman Todd Hutchinson said.

The tree was planted in the front yard of a home in an upscale neighborhood, and Farrell likely didn’t see the tree falling since it struck her from behind, Hutchinson said. “We don’t believe she saw it coming,” Hutchinson said.

No one had been digging around the tree or working on it in any way, said Hugh Brown, who owns the home and well-trimmed front yard in which he said the tree had been standing without issue for at least 10 years.

Farrell, who worked at a hair salon, had a 6-year-old daughter.

Whoa!

Found at Samizdata.net.

Note: Moved picture to extended entry (360K was just a bit too much for the main page).

Click the cute little kitten:

There’s an Energizer battery commercial that shows what appears to be a junior-high marching band on a bus.  As the batteries in one young girl’s CD player quit a boy takes advantage of the situation to take the seat next to her to share his CD player.  If that’s all there was to it, it’d be a cute commercial.  It was their musical choice of “Let’s Get It On” by Marvin Gaye that disturbed me.  It seems just a tad suggestive given the age of the subjects.

A few days ago I posted about an Alpha Phi Alpha pledge at SMU who was hospitalized after drinking too much water.  From the Dallas Morning News (annoying registration required) we’re learning a little more about just how much water he drank.

Doctors said Braylon Curry, 21, is expected to make a full recovery after ingesting 4 to 5 gallons of water, causing him to lose consciousness and become delirious during an alleged hazing incident involving the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

The SMU student newspaper reports on a detail that seems important:

Weinmeister also spoke of Curry’s initial exam in which doctors discovered bruises near his armpits and on his arms. The bruises on his arms were really the most obvious, said Weinmeister.

Given what I’ve seen of Alpha Phi Alpha when I was in school, I wouldn’t put it past them to have held him down and forced him to drink.

From the stupid human tricks department comes this story about a fraternity stunt gone wrong.

A 21-year-old student at Southern Methodist University remained hospitalized in critical condition Monday after chugging water in an off-campus competition with fraternity members.

Braylon Curry, a pledge with Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, drank an unknown amount of water from a gallon container early Saturday morning and was hospitalized hours later after becoming dazed and incoherent, Dallas police said.

I never knew that drinking too much water could be bad for you.

Excessive consumption of water can be fatal, causing pulmonary edema, a condition in which water enters the lungs, and hyponatremia, a sodium imbalance brought on by excess fluid consumption.

The average person can consume up to 15 liters of water in a 24-hour period, but drinking too much too quickly can swell brain cells and cause head pressure, said Dr. Greg Blomquist, an emergency room doctor at Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas.

I guess you learn something new every day.  However, in retrospect, the idea of a contest to see how much water you can drink does seem a bit silly.

I hate when that happens.

Link via The Fat Guy

At 6:22p.m. this evening my television officially pushed me off the deep end.  I was totally unprepared for what I saw.  I was gobsmacked.

What exactly was it that did me in?  A damn Christmas commercial from Petsmart.  It’s only November 4th for Pete’s sake!

My reserve of good cheer and good will towards man is going to be depleted long before December 25th if I have to spend two whole months subjected to fake snow and commercial cheer.  It’s enough to kill any joy that Christmas may have had left.

This is going to be a long season…

Not only are spammers evil, some of them are nuts.

This summer, Dave Hill got a refreshing break from the run-of-the-mill spam that routinely invades his e-mail inbox. Instead of hawking mortgages, penis-enlargement pills or weight-loss products, a message arrived that seemed straight out of a science-fiction novel.

The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an “Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement” and an “AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.”

While that was weird, this guy has now gone ‘round the bend completely and is attacking those who have complained about his spam.

Three websites that spotlighted a Massachusetts spammer’s bizarre quest for time-travel technology have been hit with an avalanche of what appear to be retaliatory messages.

In what spam fighters term a “Joe-job” attack, late last month someone forged the sites’ domains as the return addresses on a recent flurry of junk e-mails advertising antispam software. As a result, the innocent sites have been inundated with hundreds of thousands of error messages and complaints about the spam.

Link via Slashdot.

When I bought that workbench at Sears on Saturday I also bought a leaf blower that was on sale.  I used my Sears card to pay for them.  The sales associates always ask you for a phone number to look you up on their system.  I gave them my new number (although it won’t be active until the 16th), since I’d called them and changed the info on my account last week.  I was watching the screen when he entered my phone number and oddly enough someone else’s name showed up (along with his address—turns out he lives on the next street over).  What’s truly weird is that I know this person.  I’m hoping that Verizon didn’t screw up and give me his number (my hope is that he changed his number and I just ended up with his old one).

Update: It turns out that they haven’t used that number for about two years.  I guess that illustrates just how long out-of-date information can live on in computer systems (e.x. doing a reverse phone lookup on the number still returns Jeff as owning it).

Is there anything some idiot won’t put on TV these days?

A game of Russian Roulette with a real, loaded gun is slated to be broadcast live on British television this Sunday in what is being billed as the ultimate reality-TV stunt.

“It is a real gun with a real bullet and I am really putting it against my head,” said Derren Brown a self-styled “psychological illusionist.”

Brown plans to pull the trigger of a 348 Smith & Wesson several times, sensing which chamber the bullet is in, and plans to point the gun away from his body and fire the killer shot harmlessly into the air.

“If I am not 100 percent sure, I will not pull the trigger,” Brown said, admitting, “It would be humiliating but it would be preferable to the other consequences.”

Apparently they do have some limits, though.

The show will air on a several-second delay in case Brown shoots himself. If that happens, viewers will not see the gun fire into his head. Instead, the screen will go blank and display a message advising viewers what’s happened.

I think this guy may be in the running as a Darwin Award candidate.  Idiot.